I would like to refer you to the online journal Encyclopedeia of our colleagues in Bologna. It is a traditional journal (stemming from the Bertolini tradition), which highlights the manifold and productive nature of Phenomenological Philosophy of Education in an international context.

A table, a glass, a voice, a melody, a sensation, a touch, a problem, a surprise, a sentiment while learning, an experience between parents and child in education – these are topics that phenomenological philosophy and phenomenological educational science are concerned with. They are phenomena perceived sensually and in an embodied way. When they occur, we are involved individually and inter-subjectively at the same time. To the things themselves – this claim by Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenology, is guiding phenomenological practice. Phenomena “show themselves”. They are not objectively given facts but they appear as something in the mode of intentionality. “The formula something as something means that something (actual, possible, or impossible) is linked to something else (a sense, a meaning) and is at the same time separated from it” (Waldenfels 2011, p. 21). In intentionality, something appears as close or distant, strange or familiar, in memory, in taste, touch, or plain view. A plurality of meanings arises according to one’s individual position, interest and context, and in keeping with spatial-temporal, inter-subjective and (im)material structures. Intentional engagement in educational settings is constituted as experience, and many phenomenologists profiled below specifically understand phenomenology as the study and theory of lived experience (Erfahrung). Experience, as Husserl explains, occurs between the active production of meaning and its passive reception, arising both through “active passivity” and “passive intention” (Husserl 2001).

This means that perception directed at phenomena, in which individual sense is formed (Noesis) in the intentional act, is dependent on what shows itself in the act of perception (Noema). This passivity as characteristic for perceiving and experiencing is an important starting point for phenomenological analyses. They include spatial, temporal and embodied conditions and limitations of perceiving, thinking and acting. Experience is thus not considered to be a finished product, or an output, but a process. The “jagged lines of experience” (Waldenfels 2002) show themselves in resistant moments. These are found in things ‘un-ready-to-hand’ (Heidegger), in moments of resistance or in Widerfahrnissen (Waldenfels’ notion of pathos) as well as in human struggle, pain or disappointment (Husserl), irritations, not-knowing, not-knowing-how (Buck 1989) or crises (Bollnow). They are focussed as life-worldly, inter-corporal and inter-subjective processes marked by differences, ruptures and experiences of foreignness (Waldenfels 2002). Phenomenology starts at concrete life-worldly experiences as they occur historically and systematically earlier than their scientific concepts and methods. These primordial “silent” experiences are pre-verbal, pre-discursive and pre-reflexive (Hua I, p. 77) in the beginning. Phenomenological reflexion aims at respecting different articulations of experiences instead of occupying or colonising them.
Husserl’s thoughts are the basis of Heidegger’s, Sartre’s, Merleau-Ponty’s, Levinas’ and Plessner’s philosophy as well as of Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowledge. Phenomenology significantly influences continental philosophy with exponents such as Foucault, Derrida, Waldenfels, Ricœur and Nancy. It has furthermore become fruitful for other sciences such as sociology, aesthetics, image theory, anthropology, art and literature as well as psychology and neurosciences.
The orientation towards the life-world gives it a privilege in contrast to cognitivist and rationalist concepts, as it regards the lived body as the elementary dimension of experience in learning and educating. Husserl already determines the lived body as the “zero point of all orientation” (Hua IV, p. 158). When the lived body comes to our attention as something, we experience it as more than just a body, we experience it as lived body, as phenomenon. It is thus not to be regarded as a thing amongst others. It is rather a “transfer point” (Hua IV, p. 286) between the self and the world. Merleau-Ponty and Plessner also highlight the structure lived body (Leib) and body (Körper). The lived body is the medium of our experience of the world and of our self-awareness. It produces meanings and creates tools for “practically” and productively interpreting the world. Only within and through the lived body can we experience the here and now, up and down, right and left, earlier and later. We always perceive something meaningfully and from a certain perspective. The lived body always appears as something specific, as beautiful, as desirable. The “embodied cognition theory” (ECT) makes these phenomenological insights fruitful for a neuroscientific theory of mind, brain and attention (S. Gallagher, N. Depraz). The favour of life-worldly experiences and a sceptical distance towards theoretical, scientific, ideological and fundamentalist positions can show the way to a “third way” (Merleau-Ponty) between positivism and idealism, empiricism and rationalism.
Within pedagogy, phenomenology has a history that is over one hundred years long. From the beginning, Husserl’s main themes – time, lived body, world, otherness – are systematically combined with theories and practices of Bildung and education. Most approaches share the descriptive approach to pedagogical experience. They approach phenomena differently, using methods such as “phenomenography”, (F. Marton), “descriptive phenomenological method” (A. Giorgi), a “transcendental phenomenology” (C. Moustakas’) or an “interpretative phenomenological analysis” (J. Smith). Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus’ “model of learning” as the gradual acquisition of knowledge and skill also has phenomenological roots. Max van Manen’s “hermeneutic phenomenology” is a phenomenological method for empirical research. Van Manen regards pedagogical experiences as singular relations between adult and child, in which the adult acts intentionally for the sake of the child’s present circumstances and his or her likely future. In this context, the adult’s actions are to be guided by tact, which van Manen characterises in terms of “pathic” understanding: situated, relational, embodied, and enactive forms of “non-cognitive” learning and knowing.
Phenomenological orientations can recently be found in anthropology, early childhood education, aesthetic and cultural education, school pedagogy and school research, and, self-evidently, in educational studies. Pedagogical experiences are theoretically and empirically described in their temporal, sensual and mundane dimensions as they occur and are reflected in their respective contexts. They integrate space and time of learning and educating as well as lived body, otherness and foreigness in experiences and culture. They are discussed in fields of life-world and foreignness (Lippitz), of re-learning and corporeality (Meyer-Drawe), practice and attention (Brinkmann). Concrete embodied, emotional, social and material aspects are the focus of attention in phenomenological approaches to analyses of learning and educating as experience. These life-worldly embodied experiences can be joy, embarrassment, disappointment and irritation as well as disgust, envy, jealousy and anger in learning and educating. Phenomenological practices demand opening oneself to “the things” – as “they are given”. The phenomenological attitude demands composure, attention and attentiveness for things other and foreign, for lived sense and embodied processes – an engaged passivity.

The fourth International Symposion on Phenomenological Research in Education (“Lived Body – Corporeality – Embodiment: Pedagogical Perspectives of a Phenomenology of the Lived Body”) took place at Humboldt-University Berlin, 18th – 20th September 2017. We are looking back on a successful meeting and would like to thank all participants and presenters for interesting talks and inspiring discussions (see conference program below). Hopefully, we see you all again in two years at the next symposion!

The Fruitful Moment in the Process of Bildung by Friedrich Copei was written as his doctoral thesis under Eduard Spranger and published in 1930. As a pedagogue with an emphasis on phenomenology, he is committed to Husserl’s model of intentionality. He is interested in how far “peculiar moments, in which a new recognition hits like lightning, an intellectual substance enthralls us” (Copei 1960, p. 17) within the self- and world-relation can have a “transformational effect” with regards to intellectual, aesthetic, ethical and religious “experience” (ibid., p. 100). This is illustrated by convincing examples from teaching practice.

He thereby offers a new perspective on the discontinuous process of experience while learning. In the fruitful moment, learning is defined as a differentiation and reorganisation of experience and as relearning. Teaching thus means giving impulses as well as awaken students by means of maieutic asking and pointing, which is open and sensitive to satisfying classroom situations and which challenges children to ask questions, research and think on their own.
Friedrich Copei is a researcher from the field of practical teaching with theoretical ambitions. From 1923, he works as a basic primary and secondary school teacher (hist. Germ. Volksschullehrer) and takes leave to write his doctoral thesis under Eduard Spranger in 1929 in Berlin. Afterwards he works as a lecturer but is “dismissed from office” (Wehrmann 1982, p. 60) due to his affiliation to the SPD in 1933. He then teaches in the private school sector, where he is announced advisor for elementary school film at the “Reich Institute for Film and Images in Science and the Classroom” (ibid.). In 1945, he is recruited by the army and does not return home (cf. ibid., p. 213).

“The basic question of all description is, what the Given in the experience is. Every pedagogy and every school in pedagogy talks about education […] every school believes to know about the matter which was labelled “education” in every detail and is quick about stating what and how education should be. […] Not the meaning of the words, which is just the linguistic clarification of the meaning, but the description of the matter at question is the task which lays at the foundation of all scientific research, it is the task that makes research possible.” (Fischer 1914/1961, p. 144, translation by S.R.)

Fischer is a representative of the “Munich School” surrounding Theodor Lipps, an educational theorist and a pioneer of research in education (Bildung). The Munich phenomenologists came into contact with Husserl from 1902, who was then teaching in Göttingen. Husserl’s “Logische Untersuchungen” were critically received and connected to psychological and pedagogical questions. Fischer is one of the first to use the methodical tool of description as a means of intersubjective validation of experience and (pedagogical) interactions.

Thus description gets a methodological function and helps to address questions of the subject matter of pedagogy as a science. According to Fischer, description enables the researcher to explore “pure facts” and the „ ground of certainty” (Fischer 1914/1961, p. 144), on which educational science is established. After going through the phenomenological reduction (ibid., p. 147), phenomenological description can guarantee a “theory-free” (ibid., p. 142) description, which is also free from preconditions or prejudices. Fischer proves the fruitfulness of this method in his works on psychology and school pedagogy.

Fischer’s Realontologie (ontology of reality), the strict formalism of his method as well as the reduction of the phenomenological method to mere description and pure facts have been frequently criticized within German educational sciences. The main point of criticism is that Fischer reduces pedagogy to a science of objective facts, while not recognizing the normative and moral implications of his own research. However, Fischer has contributed a lot to scientific and empirical pedagogy. The question of description and the question of the subject matter of pedagogy still play an important role in contemporary reflections on education, learning and Bildung.